Airtel selects Ericsson for VoLTE expansion

Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) has been selected by Bharti Airtel (Airtel), India’s leading telecommunications services provider, to expand its VoLTE (voice over LTE) services in India.

This agreement will result in deployment of the Ericsson Cloud VoLTE solution, an industrialized solution to deliver VoLTE services onto a customer data center. The solution enables high-definition voice (HD voice) and provides modern communication services experiences across many types of devices, over LTE, Wi-Fi, and future 5G access.

Randeep Sekhon, CTO, Bharti Airtel, says: “We remain committed to building a state-of-the-art future-ready network as part of our network transformation program – Project Leap – and deliver best-in-class digital experience to our smartphone customers. This partnership with Ericsson will allow us to rapidly increase VoLTE capacity to serve our growing traffic, and make our network prepared to easily introduce new communication services today and in 5G.”

As per the June 2018 Ericsson Mobility Report, India is expected to have more than 780 million VoLTE subscriptions by 2023. VoLTE technology will also be the foundation for enabling 5G voice calls on different types of 5G devices.

Nunzio Mirtillo, Head of Market Area South East Asia, Oceania and India, Ericsson, says: “We are delighted to support Airtel by delivering our Ericsson Cloud VoLTE solution, which will provide them with a high-quality, modern, cloud-based solution for today’s and tomorrow’s communication service’s needs. We start today with expanding HD voice over LTE services across India, which will establish a platform to easily introduce new innovative services in the future.”

Ericsson Cloud VoLTE is an industrialized solution to deliver VoLTE services onto a customer datacenter cloud. The solution includes a complete virtual IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and supporting nodes to add VoLTE service to an existing LTE data network, and serves as a foundation to evolve and expand voice and other communication services.

It includes pre-integrated and validated design, a trained central delivery team, and delivery assets to ensure a fast, accurate, and optimized solution delivery.